Sony and Panasonic have announced that they have signed a basic agreement that will see them jointly develop a new standard for professional-use optical discs. The objective of the two companies is to expand their business for long-term digital data storage by developing an optical disc with a capacity of at least 300 GB.

The two companies are directly targeting businesses that need archival storage including motion picture, broadcasting, and cloud service industries.

Optical discs are likely to remain a preferred long-term storage option because the discs are dust- and water-resistant. Another significant benefit of using optical discs is that they allow inter-generational compatibility between different formats -- that means older optical formats can be read on current generation optical drives.

Sony and Panasonic hope to make the 300GB optical disc available by 2015.

Non-volatile means that it does not need a battery or other power source to retain its data for some reasonable amount of time. The difference is the amount of time (shelf life) that the flash can remain powered off before losing data, There are several kinds of flash and coding schemes. NOR flash has a longer shelf life than NAND. SLC coding has a longer shelf life than MLC coding.

The problem is, even NOR flash using SLC coding has a shelf life of perhaps a decade. There simply is not at this time any long term digital storage medium to compare to even mediocre quality ink on paper, let alone engraved stone and clay tablets that have lasted thousands of years. A long term digital storage medium is sorely needed. The only choice at this point is media rotation.